The invention disclosed herein relates generally to a system and method for comparing result sets that are responsive to searches over a corpus of documents. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for generating and presenting a difference result set comprising items selected according to a difference between a primary result set and a secondary result set.
When using search engines made available by commercial search providers, users are not always satisfied with the search results that these search engines generate. In an attempt to overcome perceived shortcomings with available search engines, meta-search engines provide aggregate results from a plurality of search engines to generate a meta-result set by determining the union of the result sets from a plurality of search engines. These meta-search engines, however, apply proprietary ranking algorithms to the meta-result set, which may result in items that are potentially relevant to a given user receiving a low ranking and therefore not being utilized.
What is therefore needed are systems and methods that allow a user to view a difference result set comprising differences between a result set generated by a first search engine using a first search and rank algorithm, and a secondary result set generated by a second search engine using a second search and rank algorithm. Systems and methods are also needed to track selections in the difference result set, which may be used in improving the searching and ranking of items by the first search engine.